Binta Masani

Binta Masani did not set out to become a moviemaker, but she grew into one when she realized that the medium of film would be an ideal way to visually capture the voices of African-American women.

Masani, an education consultant and Ph.D. in Education student specializing in Adult Education Leadership at Walden University, got the idea for the film when a colleague asked her to speak to a group of students at Upward Bound, an organization that helps disadvantaged and first-generation college students to be successful in higher education.

Masani thought that the Upward Bound students would benefit most from hearing the voices of a range of African-American women, not just her own, and so the short-film concept was born.

The result is a 20-minute documentary, “Our Voices Speak,” recounting the life experiences of a group of Atlanta-area African-American women, ages 16 to 96. The film’s subjects/storytellers share their experiences of overcoming adversity and their own fears and anxieties about trying new endeavors (one woman in the film enters medical school at the age of 45; another decides to pursue art in her 60s).

“The women are what I call ‘reel-to-real’ role models—ordinary women who are accomplishing extraordinary things in their lives,” Masani says of the film, which was shown at Walden’s Conference on Social Change last October as well as at venues in Atlanta. “Stories of achievement and transformation encourage struggling adult learners.”

Masani says that her doctoral work will focus in part on developing nontraditional learning opportunities for women in life transitions—in particular using stories as a way of thinking about their lives and connecting their experiences to personal and collective change.  She hopes to focus specifically on Gulf Coast women in transition, living in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

“I want to reconnect women with forms of nontraditional learning, such as quilting circles,” she says. “As a young girl, I remember hearing the stories my grandmother and other women shared while they sat together in a circle and put together pieces of cloth to make quilts. It was remembering their voices—and watching various transformations take place—that made me consider this process for educational purposes.”

She notes that another reason she chose this topic is the limited research conducted on “voice” and community among African-American women in transition: “‘Our Voices Speak’ has given me the opportunity to test the waters on this topic and to learn more about transformation learning theory, about community, about voice, and ethnography research.”

Although Masani sees herself primarily as an educator, she plans to continue working on the film.

“I hope to develop the film into a documentary on the history of African-American women in transition, showing how education, both formal and informal, has helped women transform their lives.”

—By Danielle Sweeney

February Ponder front page